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Doors open Feb. 28 to the Vancouver Wine Festival's International Tasting Room, featuring 175 wineries from around the world.

Photograph by: Handout
, Files

It is wine festival week in Vancouver, as if you didn’t know by now, and while it is easy to take the weeklong grapefest for granted it’s really not like any other event in the city. To begin, it is 35 years old. It runs for a full week throughout the city. It takes place at multiple venues and it appeals to a wide spectrum of consumers, of all ages. More importantly it has contributed a large amount of money to live theatre.

Be it the original benefactor and now defunct Playhouse Theatre Company, or the current, Bard on the Beach, the festival has selflessly given back to the arts community with a big hand from the wine community since 1979. That is a long time. At that time Joe Clark defeated Pierre Elliott Trudeau to become the Prime Minister of Canada while Margaret Thatcher took over the reins in the United Kingdom. Popular TV shows were led by MASH, Three’s Company, Dallas and The Young and the Restless (OK some things never change) while in movie theatres Kramer vs. Kramer, Alien and The Deer Hunter were drawing large crowds. Inventions of the day included the Snowboard, NTT the first cellular network and Sony introduced its Walkman.

Wine in Vancouver, at least as we know it today, was almost non-existent. There were small pockets of collectors and connoisseurs who were travelling mostly to California and France but there were very few wines in most government stores worth drinking and even fewer worth collecting.

In those days if you wanted to meet the Vancouver wine community you had to go to Blaine on Saturday morning. Not far across the border in countless lockers, stacks of class-growth Bordeaux, Grand Cru Burgundy and icon Napa Valley wine was stacked to the ceiling. The definition of a wine friend was a ‘warm body,’ as in an individual available to sit in your car and cross the border to claim the one case, per person, per crossing allowance after paying duty and excise. With an empty car trunk in the Canadian parking lot we would race around the flagpole all morning bringing back cases of wine unavailable in B.C., and considerably cheaper (OK, some things never change).

Another place to meet wine buyers was Calgary; many a carload of Bordeaux crossed the Rockies in those days, mysteriously disappearing from Alberta government wines stores into B.C. wine cellars. After Alberta privatized, the illegal sales of yesteryear ramped up to where they are today. No one in Alberta is allowed to ship wine into British Columbia yet Alberta wine sales are on fire as if the population had grown by more than 3.5 million people. Did we mention some things never change?

But back to the festival. In a highly-compressed history the festival opened up the city’s eyes to the world of wine. Visiting principals began to seek out wine-friendly restaurants and encouraged them to sell better wines to attract wine lovers to eat out. Restaurant owners and chefs began to travel to wine country. Ideas were exchanged, menus were redeveloped and the dining scene exploded with the help wine. The Four Seasons Hotel, GM at the time Ruy Paes Braga and his team, owned the ‘winemaker’s dinner’ title for almost two decades and no one has done a better job since.

At the same time the wine agency business exploded, creating more and more jobs for people who wanted to make wine distributing a business and who vastly improved selection in government stores. The Okanagan was shunned during the early years of the festival because frankly the wines did not measure up, but the business of growing wine locally developed wide appeal in the intervening years and they are vital components now. Most of their success is directly linked to the growing culture of wine the festival has nurtured and the competitive juices being a chosen exhibitor inside the International Tasting Room.

Private wine stores are finally beginning to up the ante, although they seem to spend more time complaining about the rules they agreed to work under when they obtained their licenses than improving pricing and wine selection. Some things never change.

That said the doors open Thursday to the International Tasting Room and 175 wineries from around the world will put on a show like we haven’t seen in exactly one year pouring the latest in wine. And the city that loves wine and has an opinion about every bottle it drinks will be energized for another year. But then things never really change, do they?

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